SEO question, from someone with a white hat.

[scootermaster]

I've been reading a bit about SEO, and it seems like the thing people post the most is "just have good content and get people to link to you and you're set". The problem is, that sounds a bit like viral marketing, and I'd prefer to have to do as little of that as possible (i.e. I don't really want to sign up for forums and shill for the website). Maybe I have the wrong idea, but without gently suggesting to strangers that they check it out, how are they going to find it initially?

So my question is: What can someone who has great content do, with the least amount of viral marketing possible, do to increase website visibility?

A Q&A round to save you some time:

Q: What's the website about?
A: Obesity/weight loss

Q: A-HA! That's such a crowded field, why would anyone care about your website? What makes you think this content is actually more worthwhile?
A: Because it's pretty much going to be the contents of three previously published books (like, published for real), plus additional content that's web-only. These books (or the author) were featured on 20/20, Hard Copy, Shape Magazine, Self Magazine, US Weekly, Book of the Month Club, etc etc.

Q: Are you serious?
A: I am serious

Q: So this is real content.
A: Yes, this is real content.

Q: What's the point of all of this?
A: The author has a new book coming out on childhood obesity. He'd like these websites to funnel traffic to people so they can buy the book. He'd also like to further monetize the contents of his previous books by creating web content with ads


So, my point is this: There's a lot of absolute crap out there (and I'm not just talking about hocus-pokus weight loss stuff. Sure, that exists, but it always has and always will and the website isn't looking to compete with that). I'm talking about link farms and landing pages and things that look like real websites but are just glorified adsense links and all of that.

So how does something with real content rise above? Do you just put your content out, and hope google finds you? Or do you really have to do a bit of viral marketing on your own?

Thanks for any input and advice!

 

[ViviTheMage]

I know there are some hardcore SEO guys on this board, I can't remember their usernames though.

SEO sucks, I hate dealing with it, haha.

Go over here, these guys are crazy :http://www.warriorforum.com/

 

[Q]

There's a lot more than just good content to SEO, and a LOT of it depends on your site's backend / how code is written (meta tags, keywords h1 headers, placement of links, sitemaps, alt tags for images, etc).

Link farms and constant link trading is actually bad for SEO, and can lead Google to actually 'take points' away from your Pagerank, etc because they see that you are doing this.

It's hard to offer help without actually seeing the website you are referring to. One thing that you can try and for PR building, use Google to find your competitors. Find their inbound links, figure out how they are getting them, and try and imitate that. Also for keyword building, use Google's Webmaster tools to see what keywords are possible to gain some 'market share' in. You can do this by dividing the number of search results by number of searches for that keyword, and you'll get a ratio. Different sites/books give you a different # of ratio that says you should go after, but really any keyword that has a relatively small number of results vs. the highest keyword you can compete against.

OK, after reading my above statement, that doesn't make much sense.

Example: "weight loss" = about 90 million pages, "decrease calories" = about 5 million. Decrease calories is a good keyword phrase to capture.

Disclaimer: I am very new to SEO as well, so this is just based of my noob experiences / things I have read.

 

[SphinxnihpS]

Wait... what?

 

[scootermaster]

Thanks for the tips. What about adsense? Is it still PPC? And there's no way of knowing how much a click makes, right? So there's no way of knowing if this will be "worth it", right? (or how much traffic/how many impressions/clicks you'd need to make the whole operation worthwhile)

I looked at the Adwords generator, and a lot of obesity-related keywords had a full green bar (i.e. a lot of "competition"/bidding) but they don't exactly say what that means, and they certainly don't say what that means for Adsense. It'd seem to me that high competition keywords would mean that there would be enough bids for just about any one -- and that the price would be higher -- but I guess there's no guarantee of that?

As for competitors, honestly, I haven't actually seen any real ones yet. I feel like the best use of time as far as competitors would be to somehow notify google that they're just glorified adsense repositories and see if they'll get shut down or have decreased pagerank.

 

[Kev]

I ran an adsense campaign once and IMO it is just click fraud waiting to happen. I don't know if google has decided to do anything about this yet - my experience was 2 or 3 years ago - but I would just stick to adwords.

 

[scootermaster]

I ran an adsense campaign once and IMO it is just click fraud waiting to happen. I don't know if google has decided to do anything about this yet - my experience was 2 or 3 years ago - but I would just stick to adwords.

I'm not really looking to have an ad campaign. It's possible there'll be some advertising in the future, but not right now. Right now, I'm looking to place ads on the websites I'm creating. (I wish google coulda named their products something like THIS_STUFF_MAKES_YOU_MONEY_ad and THIS_STUFF_COSTS_YOU_MONEY_ad, because tehre's ALWAYS confusion when having a convo about adsense and adwords)

So my question was about adsense and how you can have an idea of what kind of revenue you might generate given an amount of traffic or clickthrough rate.

 

[Q]

Thanks for the tips. What about adsense? Is it still PPC? And there's no way of knowing how much a click makes, right? So there's no way of knowing if this will be "worth it", right? (or how much traffic/how many impressions/clicks you'd need to make the whole operation worthwhile)

I looked at the Adwords generator, and a lot of obesity-related keywords had a full green bar (i.e. a lot of "competition"/bidding) but they don't exactly say what that means, and they certainly don't say what that means for Adsense. It'd seem to me that high competition keywords would mean that there would be enough bids for just about any one -- and that the price would be higher -- but I guess there's no guarantee of that?

As for competitors, honestly, I haven't actually seen any real ones yet. I feel like the best use of time as far as competitors would be to somehow notify google that they're just glorified adsense repositories and see if they'll get shut down or have decreased pagerank.

Adsense can be PPC or based on number of impressions (usually per 1000). You can tell how much a click costs, if that's what you mean? You can set monetary limits on each individual keyword, phrase, campaign, etc so you don't do over your budget. If you are selling items on your site, you can also see if a click led to a purchase (conversion), though this isn't 100% worthy, since you never know if a visitor clicked the ad, came to your site, left, and then bought it (I think).

I would advise against Adwords right now if you do not have any products you are selling.

For the green bars you are seeing, that's showing the most 'used' keywords, and hence are the most expensive and most difficult to gain any share in. That's where in my previous response I said you should focus on easier targets, or phrases. Some keywords, even if they are the top, you (anyone) can get high SERPs with, but it all depends on the keywords you are searching. (For example, "buy xbox 360" is extremely difficult , while "paint xbox 360" is very possible to gain #1 result in Google for).

 

[JS80]

You have two choices. Like others have said, buy SEM. Or, spend $10k and hire a PR Agency who might be able to get you a few hits in the media in print or web.

 

[Red Squirrel]

No need to buy anything.

Just be smart about your wording in articles and other content, also don't use javascript, flash, and other crap that makes the code too complicated. Web crawlers do much better with basic html/css. I've heard the use of the <h*> tags help too, but I'm not sure if it does or not. There are lot of myths about what helps and what does not in SEO. Best is to just experiment and see what works best for you and ranks your site higher.

I can usually get on the first page of google quite easily. Though TBH I seem to just get lucky, I don't really do anything all that unusual other then my wording and use of basic html/css.

 

[scootermaster]

Adsense can be PPC or based on number of impressions (usually per 1000). You can tell how much a click costs, if that's what you mean? You can set monetary limits on each individual keyword, phrase, campaign, etc so you don't do over your budget. If you are selling items on your site, you can also see if a click led to a purchase (conversion), though this isn't 100% worthy, since you never know if a visitor clicked the ad, came to your site, left, and then bought it (I think).

I would advise against Adwords right now if you do not have any products you are selling.

For the green bars you are seeing, that's showing the most 'used' keywords, and hence are the most expensive and most difficult to gain any share in. That's where in my previous response I said you should focus on easier targets, or phrases. Some keywords, even if they are the top, you (anyone) can get high SERPs with, but it all depends on the keywords you are searching. (For example, "buy xbox 360" is extremely difficult , while "paint xbox 360" is very possible to gain #1 result in Google for).

Again, I don't want to pay for adsense (i.e. I don't want to pay for ads) I want to get paid BY adsense (i.e. have ads on these sites). Unless the rules have changed in the last 5 years, this is still possible, no?

So there's no way of telling how much you're going to get paid for ads on your site, right?

 

[Q]

Again, I don't want to pay for adsense (i.e. I don't want to pay for ads) I want to get paid BY adsense (i.e. have ads on these sites). Unless the rules have changed in the last 5 years, this is still possible, no?

So there's no way of telling how much you're going to get paid for ads on your site, right?

Ah my bad, I was getting the two mixed up somehow, sorry!

Yes, you can still do that. I haven't personally used Adsense to earn money, so someone else would be best to answer that.

 

[scootermaster]

Ah my bad, I was getting the two mixed up somehow, sorry!

Yes, you can still do that. I haven't personally used Adsense to earn money, so someone else would be best to answer that.

That's what I'm saying...they should have obvious names for their products. 🙂


Anyone else have any input?

 

[cheezy321]

I have some experience with this. After reading this thread, the best way to improve SEO is to get some inbound links. Someone here already gave the fantastic suggestion of finding a competitor with a high PR (If you don't already have it, get the Google toolbar) and replicating what they do. It will provide you with a few 'leads' to get some inbound links.

Yes, content is always king for SEO. Inbound links are 2nd to this. Getting good content with highly targeted keywords is very beneficial.

Get used to using this:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Check out the "Choose columns to display" dropdown menu and select "Show avg. Cost Per Click". A new column will show up which will tell you exactly what you should expect to pay to advertise for that keyword.

Google says they will pay you 60&#37; of the Cost Per Click on adsense. I have witnessed prices dramatically below that. One of the main keywords I target on a website has about a $19.50 CPC (According to google keyword tool). I get anywhere from .40 cents to $3.50 per adsense click on my website. It varies dramatically, but I would say I average about $1.50 per adsense click.

Over the past 4 months I have had about a 12.5% CTR on the adsense ads. I consider this to be above average. Many websites consider a 1-2% CTR on ads about average.

If you want to ask more questions, feel free to PM me